A mural at George Washington high school in San Francisco.
Photograph: Walter Thompson/The Guardian

Even urging a “truer history”, Paloma Flores, a member of California’s Pitt River tribe, questions the validity of showing an image of a murdered Native American. She’s disturbed by the message of a mural at George Washington high school in San Francisco, where she works, that has been in place for 84 years.

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Even while advocating for the type of unconventional honesty the mural relates, Flores told the Guardian, she worries about “the dominant narrative view of erasure, the romanticizing of the settlement process, and the lies that have been told”.

Notwithstanding the extent to which they were once glorified, some historical figures, their mission, methods and deeds reconsidered, are seen today as so heinous that it is widely agreed they should no longer be honored. Should such second thoughts include George Washington?

Most now concede there is little to be gained from celebrating Columbus Day, that Columbus Circle might just be better renamed Sinatra Circus. As to the many monuments all but deifying Robert E Lee, casting his “lost cause” of maintaining and expanding slavery as a noble one, there is growing consensus: all should be removed from the public square and put in museums devoted to America’s first civil war.

Washington and Jefferson, like most of the founding fathers, were complicated people with contradictory outlooks

Washington, though, is exalted as the father of our country, bestowing his name on the capital, an obelisk more massive than any pharaoh’s erected to his memory. The next step in the creation of a secular saint was to make a shrine of his home. This entailed a band of devoted women, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. In the midst of war, they raised enormous sums for restoration. These efforts failed to includequarters for a workforce of 317 slaves.

A century passed before lost cabins and dormitories were replicated. Their absence was as purposeful as a pantheon of Confederate heroes erected along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Both actions aimed to alter the past. One to celebrate treason and tyranny, to justify the indefensible. The other to obscure the reality of what big houses on broad acres, like Monticello or Mount Vernon, might cost in terms of human suffering.

Washington and Jefferson, like most of the founding fathers, were complicated people with contradictory outlooks. Intellectually, abstractly, both came to abhor the idea of slavery. But each so benefited from it that they could not muster the courage to exist without its advantages. The first president never espoused the white supremacy Jefferson did, as uncontested fact, ordained by God. But he was also a stern taskmaster. Nor did Jefferson eschew brutal punishment when productivity and discipline were at stake.

Originators of a myth of masters of exemplary benevolence and unusual kindness, these men were neither. What redeems them, then, is not all that they did, but the government they put in place. Capable of freeing the oppressed, America offers the possibility of liberty and justice as well as true hope for happiness.

Rooted in conquest, genocide and slavery, America’s origins have made the “whitewashing” of history and the adulation of imperfect leaders common enough. Everything from grade school primers to Hollywood blockbusters has contributed to the propaganda of early American paragons and pre-eminence. Once, the entire culture effected unity through exclusion, untruths and ruthlessness. Irrespective of race, religion, ethnicity or class, in the existential battle between cowboys and Indians, children automatically cheered the cowboys, much as their parents cheered Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.

A mural at George Washington high school. Photograph: Walter Thompson/The Guardian

But the Great Depression was so visceral a challenge that artists began, if sometimes stealthily, to show what really happened. In 1936, a pair of murals commissioned by the federal Works Progress Administration were installed a continent apart.

In San Francisco, a son of a Russian Orthodox priest, Victor Arnautoff, depicted the life of Washington at a streamlined art moderne high school bearing the leader’s name. Instead of the cherry-tree-chopping-truth-teller the painter might have once conveyed, we have an accurate reading of a stern slave master so morally conflicted he attempted more than once to reason with escaped slaves, saying they were “ungrateful”, that it was in their best interest to return. In the form of a murdered brave, one also sees the atrocity attendant to America’s manifest destiny.

Exploitation of Labor and Hoarding of Wealth is an unvarnished and now deteriorating version of America the Beautiful

In Harlem, meanwhile, in a turn-of-the-century Victorian gothic courthouse, David Karfunkle, a Viennese immigrant, portrayed conquistadors and slaves in panels entitled Exploitation of Labor and Hoarding of Wealth, in an unvarnished and now deteriorating version of America the Beautiful.

Arnautoff’s brief association with Diego Rivera is believed to have helped radicalize a one-time “White Russian” sympathizer who later appeared before a House committee investigating “un-American” activities. For Karfunkle, just being Jewish and watching the rise of Hitler was probably enough to motivate such honesty.

Seventeen years ago, the vaulted courtroom he embellished was reopened after a $2.8m renovation. The public no longer saw his pendant fresco and canvas. They were hidden by buff-colored curtains.

An African American court employee said a bare-breasted enslaved woman offended her. The employee has retired but the flaking artwork remains concealed. Among older critics, a pose of self-righteous indignation is understandable. In the Bush years, the Department of Justice’s cover-up of a partly nude art deco statue, after the attorney general, John Ashcroft, said he was uncomfortable with its nakedness, wasted $8,650.

David Karfunkle, a Viennese immigrant. Photograph: Archives of American Art/Wikimedia Commons

But Arnautoff’s now “ancient” installation in San Francisco is another matter. Can the students who see it, who by the time they reach secondary school have seen so much gratuitous gore-as-entertainment and triple-X porn, really be so easily distressed?

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And what of those teaching in such unashamedly anti-intellectual times? How could educators recommend the archived exile of so unflinching a look at American history? Only one of an 11-member working group – a historian – voted to retain Life of Washington.

The matter will be decided by the city’s board of education. But because the school was built under FDR’s Works Progress Administration, the federal General Services Administration will be the ultimate arbiter. It’s hardly likely an administration dismissive of the racist cruelty of Andrew Jackson will countenance Washington’s banishment.

Flores worries this might be dangerous:

I knew how to respond to it … But why would we believe that young minds are expected to discern better? Washington high’s murals are disturbing and they do have dire consequences … I learned a lot, to be honest, from the artist’s perspective, but how are we to talk of what one’s intent or perspective would have been if that person’s not present? … It’s all interpretation, and even with the best intention, harm can be done …

Educated youngsters insist on Facebook that “Lincoln was racist!”, “Gandhi was racist!” or “Margaret Sanger was racist!”, without bothering to learn how sometimes people evolve, even to atone for ignorant disgrace. The emperor has no clothes, and the first lady, with some frequency within memory, had none either. The most highly placed and their cohorts of lawyers and media distort, dissemble, deceive.

Isn’t it wise to protect and display works of art which offer a warning of what not to try, ignore or condone?